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Recovering Weirdo Congressbum Thaddeus McCotter Wrote A Short Story! It’s Not Very Good!

Greetings, prose-act nation, and welcome to Doktor Zoom’s Fanfic Corner. Today, we’ll be sampling some awesome fan fiction from around the web. Our first selection is from a site that doesn’t usually run fanfic, Tucker Carlson’s Internet Tendency. It’s by aspiring TV sitcom writer and Tea Party rockmeister Thad McCotter, whose author tag describes him as “a simple country lawyer from Detroit and a recovering Congressbum.” Ha-ha! Self-deprecating humor will win the reader over for sure!

While McCotter hasn’t specified what fictional universe the story is set in, it wouldn’t seem out of place in the worlds of Revolution,Red Dawn, or perhaps The Turner Diaries. It’s a fairly routine post-apocalyptic political “what-if” story titled “In Aeternum,” which is of course Latin for “Forever.” When are first-time posters going to learn that tossing around Latin all willy-nilly suggests pretentiousness, not gravitas?

In any case, the story goes something like this (and of course, spoiler warnings apply, insofar as something this predictable can be spoiled): Tomas, a 13-year-old child soldier forced to carry a gun in the “Grand Army of the People” in an unnamed “war-ravaged land,” slips away from his camp to try to supplement his meager belongings by illegally looting the corpses of those who were executed by the rebels. We get few hints of where and when the story takes place, only that it is set in a jungle, and that the revolution is devoted to

Birthing a new nation where no one was poor required everyone doing their duty. Those who did lived; those who didn’t died.

We also find out that Tomas is at a camp where “enemies of the people” are executed and their bodies tossed in a mass grave:

Its rim brimmed with the criminal elite’s corpses — monopolists, intellectuals, artists, priests and other irredeemable deviants blind to the nation’s “New Dawn.”

Where could this place possibly be?

Anyway, climbing down into the pit, Tomas tries to steal the shoes off of a decaying body; one comes off easily, but while trying to remove the other, he pulls too hard, the corpse’s leg snaps in half, and Tomas falls backward, hitting his head on a rock. Badly concussed, he notices a piece of paper in the corpse’s mouth, removes it, and recognizes the body as that of a poet who “refused to be re-educated before he got shot.” Tomas recalls the poet’s shooting as “the camp’s most memorable execution — except for the girl.” [Ed note: IS IT SARAH PALIN???? IT IS SARAH PALIN RIGHT?]

Woozy and bleeding from the back of his head, Tomas decides to rest “for just a moment” and read the dead man’s letter before sneaking back into camp, even though he knows “the captain” will soon wake. Tomas reads the poet’s letter, a declaration of undying love — almost certainly “the girl” — and its text is interspersed with Tomas’s memories of seeing “the girl” and her infant shot by a firing squad and tossed into another mass grave. The poet’s letter laments his involvement with the revolution that ultimately killed him: “Oh, Maria, what would we be if I’d loved a person not a people?” [Ed note: Sadly no.]

The POV shifts in the final section, as we see “the captain,” who has just shot a sleeping Tomas, wearily order a private to push the boy’s body into the pit. The captain glances at the love note and dismssively pockets it, and the story ends as the private asks him, “Find something, Sir?” The captain simply replies, “Toilet paper.”

Let’s start by checking off a few strong points of this fic. McCotter avoids a few of the pitfalls — heh-heh — of the postapocalyptic genre. There’s no Mary Sue character, and no overt speechifying about how the unnamed culture became the dead poet’s society. It doesn’t get bogged down in speculative details about the tactics of the revolution, or of the resistance. There’s no slash, thank god, no “Off with those pants” moment. And even though we were expecting it, there’s no blown-up Statue of Liberty to club us over the head and say it was U.S. America all the time! Even so, it’s clear that this is a tale of what will inevitably happen when people making over $250,000 annually are taxed at the same rate they were during the Clinton administration — we remember the death camps then, don’t we?

Also intriguing is McCotter’s decision to give the only named characters Latino names: Tomas, Maria, Jorge, José. We are unsure whether this is for the sake of ambiguity — “Oh, maybe it’s not the USA, but instead it is Central America!” — or if there’s a deliberate intention to suggest that lazy Messicans will revolt and take everything from the productive class, creating not a redistributionist paradise, but instead a hellish nightmare where no one has anything… Who are we kidding? This is the Daily Caller.

We don’t want to waste too much time on this thing, but now you know it exists. We wish Mr. McCotter good luck with his writing! Remember, Thad, give us characters we can care about! Next up, we’ll take a look at the latest installment of a far better fanfic, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and then, as always, we’ll close with some My Little Pony Rule 34. I don’t know why you people keep requesting that.

Doktor Zoom Is the pseudonym of Marty Kelley, who lives in Boise, Idaho. He acquired his nym from a fan of Silver-Age comics after being differently punctual to too many meetings. He is not a medical doctor, although he has a real PhD (in Rhetoric and Composition).
He loves upvoting your comments but Disqus is broken and his upvotes don't "stick." Just assume he upvoted what you said, because it was excellent and witty.

I don't know what the hell you are talking about, but I know Tempus Fugit and something something cunnilingus. Totally Latin.

prommie

Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae

skoalrebel

Simia quam similis, turpissimus bestia, nobis! [sputo]

Antispandex

Sorry. In vino veritas, is the only latin I know. Oddly appropriate considering this is Wonkette and all.

sullivanst

"E pluribus unum" libel!

Antispandex

No, no, it's just that I don't know what a "pluribus" is, that's all.

GemlikeFlame

From memory, second declension nominative of plura, which is to say a metric assload of things (sorry for the coarseness, my Latin teacher had a rather earthy teaching style, and now I have to go look it up and see if I'm anywhere near right.)

For sheer obfuscation I prefer aliquot, though.

sullivanst

It would have to be ablative coming after "E", no? "Out of many" is definitely an ablative sense.

GemlikeFlame

Fine, ablative. For extra credit, please tell me which of the 75 kinds of ablative it is. No wonder it's a dead language.

sullivanst

Ablative of separation.

Fun fact: the ablative absolute exists in English, sort of. Also, many of the reasons that English is considered one of the hardest languages for non-native speakers to learn have to do with it not having rules that were present in Latin. I struggled as much with parts of Moby Dick as I did with Catullus – case and gender agreement makes widely separated elements from complex sentences easier to reunite – but the latter was more rewarding.

Ah, yes! I have fond memories of his "Here I sit, all broken-hearted" poem, a reflection on the futility of the human condition, followed by "For a good time, call Thad," a joyous celebration of diversity.

Naw man, in that weirdness the chick lives (i saw that show for the first time yesterday coincidentally, IN AMERICA!!! …or something I couldn't understand their Puerto Rican accents and I was distracted by the lack of zombie Natalie Wood) But anywoo, sweetie, you can't have a GOPer driven plot where a lame ass girl is the one who survives.

When are first-time posters going to learn that tossing around Latin all willy-nilly suggests pretentiousness, not gravitas?

That one is all win.

Biel_ze_Bubba

Gravitas … what language is that?

BaldarTFlagass

Alan Moore will be initiating his lawsuit in 3… 2…

Butch_Wagstaff

Followed by Harlan Ellison…

calliecallie

"Birthing a new nation where no one was poor required everyone doing their duty. Those who did lived; those who didn’t died."

Do your duty, poors! So you won't be poor. Birth of a nation, Tomas.

Wow. Thad McCooter is more fucked up than I thought.

BaldarTFlagass

Romani Eunt Ite Domum!!

MosesInvests

Now copy that 1000 times or I'll cut your balls off!

memzilla

"It was a dark and stormy wingtard."

prommie

I am sure its better than any of my pathetic efforts. What a fucking sad lonely stereotype of an English major I was dreaming of writing the Great American Novel and running with the bulls in Pamplona and writing the most wretched drivel ever seen on earth. And fucking Catch-22 turns out to be the great american novel and how the fuck does point of view work and how in the fuck was I supposed to keep it consistent? So then you chain yourself to a desk and work away your youth and your strength at a job you despise until your spirit dies and your body follows suit. See, I am fucking hopeful!

FakaktaSouth

I don't know, did you try writing about a wide-eyed college gal getting tied up and spanked by an artsy dude? Or high school girls getting tied up and spanked by vampires and werewolves? You seem to know about being tied to a desk, maybe run with that? Cause I hate to tells ya, but that is what passes for Great in American novels now.

I saw the original as a kid. I was about 9 years old. Even then I realized it was crap. I always knew what that when way too many kids who grew up in the 1980s went to Hollywood, it would not end well. Examples: a fucking Smurfs movie, a GI Joe movie, a fucking remake of Red Dawn, and the entire Transformers movie franchise. And people thought that making movies in 1990s based on old tv shows from the 1960s and 70s was bad enough…

memzilla

"Rojo Amanecer Dos: Boogaloo Eléctrico"

Negropolis

If you're talking about the new one, I don't see how it couldn't be better.

HempDogbane

This story went on for an Aeternity.

rickmaci

Somebody is all bitterz and butthert over getting caught committing election fraud and being run out of town tarred and feathered and riding on a greased log. Although I'm guessing he wasn't so mad about the greased log part.

Adrenaline coursed through limbs thinner than the diet of cold gruel the soldiers fed him and the foraged fruit the kind captain snuck him

Thaddy-boy, why are you even trying?
Save yourself some headache: sell the rights to your plump-with-potential name instead; in the right hands you could achieve literary immortality with a fraction of the tedium this purple prosey effort is exerting on you.

I really wanted to like it, but the guy honestly had no idea Austen was being snarkalicious. It made the whole thing fall flattish. (Except for the whole shooting jaunt to bag "the first zombies of spring" which was a terrific image.)

Y'know Doc, technically the term "Fan Fiction" only applies to stories written using the characters and basic framework of previously established fictional works, and technically, "Slash" fiction has parts where those characters have sex.

Technically, McCotter's efforts here fall under neither category, but rather under the category of "shit."

MonkeyMotion

The captain glances at the love note and dismissively pockets it, and the story ends as the private asks him, “Find something, Sir?” The captain simply replies, “Toilet paper.”

I'm glad there are brave souls like Thad McCotter out there who are using fiction for the purpose of taking a stand against brutal authoritarianism. Pol Pot must be shaking in his woven flip-flops right now.

GOD DAMN IT, DOK, why in the fucking hell did you post to a barely-updated WIP?

whyyyyyyyyyyy

(Please tell me there's a point to the whole Azkaban thingy and the intramural battle tournaments other than to channel Manga and summer camp color war memes.)

Doktor Zoom

I'm kind of mean that way.

WhatTheHolyHeck

I want to hate you, I do, but thet's one hell of a story. Plus you also kind of rock a bit.

owhatever

Tomas made his escape as far as the four-car elevator in the seaside home of the rightful government's leader, but the leader's wife, known to all as Beloved Egg, sobbing softly, ran over him with her Cadillac.